Validity’s Everest email optimization platform helps TheLoyaltyCo. double their inbox placement to 99%
The Highlights:
2x
Increase in inbox placement
99%
Inbox placement rate
77%
Reduction in unknown user rates
The challenge:
Poor deliverability impacting sender reputation, program performance, and incremental revenue.
Individual Restaurants is one of the UK’s leading privately owned restaurant groups with over 40 upmarket Italian and Grill restaurants located across central London, as well as other major UK cities, affluent towns, and their suburbs. Individual Restaurants operates Club Individual – their lifestyle and rewards club – and TheLoyaltyCo. manages this program on their behalf.
Email is Club Individual’s primary communication channel, keeping over 1M customers informed about what’s happening within its restaurants through weekly updates and guides, and driving important incremental revenue. Having taken on the management of Club Individual, TheLoyaltyCo. felt the program’s email channel wasn’t performing to its full potential due to poor deliverability.
Initial discovery conversations with Validity confirmed this suspicion. Sender reputation metrics were sub-optimal, complaint rates were high, spam trap hits were prevalent, and more than half of Club Individual’s emails were landing in spam folders at major mailbox providers (MBPs) like Microsoft.
“While we knew the email program was engaging, poor inbox placement meant less than half of the subscriber base was receiving emails to their inboxes, which was having a massive impact on overall program effectiveness.”
Adam Purslow – CEO, TheLoyaltyCo.
The solution:
Everest, BriteVerify, and Certification.
TheLoyaltyCo. invested in Validity’s Everest email optimization platform, providing a comprehensive solution to improve Club Individual’s sender reputation and inbox placement performance. The increased visibility Everest provided immediately opened up a number of important improvement opportunities:
- IP addresses were set up for reputation monitoring, quickly identifying the factors that were causing the filtering and blocking of email traffic.
- All email addresses were verified to identify invalid and risky records that were negatively impacting deliverability.
- Inbox placement seeding was implemented to accurately measure the percentage of subscribers who were actually seeing their emails, as well as which MBPs were mostly problematic.
- Certification was activated, providing allow-listed status for over 100 MBPs and spam filtering vendors around the world.
- Render testing and device monitoring provided valuable, additional insights into how Club Individual’s subscribers engage with their emails.
“Using Validity’s solutions, Individual Restaurants was able to significantly improve their program performance in just a matter of weeks. Using BriteVerify for email validation, Everest for reputation monitoring and email render testing, and Certification to maximise inbox placement and lock in best practices has really moved the needle.”
Adam Purslow – CEO, TheLoyaltyCo.
The results:
Double the inbox placement, exceptional opens and clicks, and more revenue.
TheLoyaltyCo. saw major uplifts in Club Individual’s email program performance following implementation of the solution described above. Performance data from Everest meant this improvement could be quantified:
- BriteVerify list verification identified almost 10% of Club Individual’s email addresses as either invalid or risky to use. Suppressing them saw an immediate reduction in spam trap hits, which are now down to one quarter of initial levels.
- Overall inbox placement rates have doubled from 45% to 99%. This includes all the major global MBPs (Microsoft, Gmail, and Yahoo!), as well as important local providers like BT Internet. Together, they represent 99% of Club Individual’s MBP footprint.
- Club Individual’s IP addresses are now achieving average Sender Scores of 99. In the 30-day post-activation period, individual IP addresses showed a 77% reduction in unknown user rates and a 93% reduction in message filtering rates.
- This uplift in reputation was also visible in the program’s Microsoft SNDS metrics, which show the percentage of times Microsoft’s filtering rendered a spam verdict. Previously a combination of yellow/red, these scores are now consistently green.
Most importantly, this improved performance is also clearly reflected in TheLoyaltyCo.’s own reporting for Club Individual’s email program:
Particularly pleasing is that the click-through rate uplift is greater than the open-rate uplift, indicating program performance has not improved solely because of better inbox placement. Club Individual’s subscribers are also engaging more positively with their emails as a result of the increased relevance and trust, both of which come from these more consistent sending practices.
Adam Purslow, CEO of TheLoyaltyCo., said, “The results were clear! 100% inbox placement means far better click-through rates and more engaged subscribers. The end result is better informed guests, which in turn leads to busier restaurants . . . and more revenue.”
Based on this success story, TLC has made a further investment in Validity’s ASP Certification solution to provide additional deliverability reassurance for their transactional traffic and smaller volume senders.
“At TLC we are seen as experts in our field. Not only in the delivery of bespoke loyalty services, but also in the delivery of our client’s customer loyalty communications. Working with Validity for our larger scale projects to deliver performance uplifts in email communications is essential and ensures our clients they are in very capable hands for their communication consultancy services.”
Rosie Relton – Business Development Director, TheLoyaltyCo.
TheLoyaltyCo. (TLC) was founded in 2019, formed from a team with over 25 years of experience in the loyalty, technology, and hospitality industries. TLC offers bespoke customer loyalty solutions, building and implementing outstanding apps, websites, and online ordering platforms for well-known brands such as Gino D’Acampo, Individual Restaurants, and Henri Lloyd. TLC’s tailored solutions aid brands in getting the most from their marketing budgets by collecting customer data and providing new tools for omni-channel communications.
